Steve Pope wrote:
> Dan Abel > wrote:
>
>> I'm not so sure. It certainly works the other way. If your house
>> wiring, receptacles, light switches, sockets and fixtures are rated for
>> 220 volts, they will work fine on 110. If your house wiring,
>> receptacles, light switches, sockets and fixtures are rated for 110,
>> then they aren't rated for 220. The bulb and the plug will work fine,
>> but in my mind, the rest is questionable.
>
> Here's an anecdote. We have a laptop whose power cable has a
> three-prong, standard American power plug on it. It runs
> off either 120V or 240V, 50 or 60 Hz. So when traveling,
> it can be plugged into a European circuit -- with the appropriate
> adaptor.
>
> The appropriate adaptors often only accept a two-pronged plug,
> so we also need a "cheater" -- the gizmo that lets you plug
> a 3-prong plug into a 2-prong outlet, such as many Americans
> have on say their refirgerator. So we once had such a cheater,
> that was rated at only 120V, and were using it to plug the
> laptop into a 240V circuit.
>
> It smoked.
>
> Everything else was rated for 240, including the laptop cable
> itself. It would have been safer to just cut the third prong off...
>
> To this day I haven't been able to find a 240-Volt rate, American-plug
> cheater.

If you look at the specifications of our power system you will see
voltage figures ranging from 110V to 120V. This means there's a built-in
leeway for our system, which is really 115V plus or minus 5V. Our
electric company pretty much keeps it dead-on 115 volts. The also keep
the frequency pretty much dead-on 60Hz average. They actually have a
counter that keeps track of the number of cycles during a 24 hour period
and will speed up or slow the cycles at night to keep the electric
clocks on time. Well, at least, that's what I was told.

My guess is that a 220V system is really a 230V system give or take 10V.


>
>
> Steve